Mindlessly scroll through TikTok long enough and you’re bound to stumble on one: An older person, possibly a boomer, gesturing blithely at something—maybe it’s a B&B, maybe it’s a set of blinds—and unfurling a litany of Gen Z slang. “Northumberland Zoo hits different”; “slay”; “no cap”; “It’s giving literate.” To date, there are nearly 4,000 of these videos, and they’ve been viewed millions of times.
Each view feels like a nail in some sort of linguistic coffin.
That’s not to say the “Gen Z writes the marketing script” videos aren’t cute. They are. Most of them even feel earnest, their cringeyness intentional. But as anyone on the internet, or anyone who has experienced adolescence, will tell you: Once anyone over, idk, 35 starts using your slang—maybe once they’ve heard it, even—it’s over.
Perhaps it should be. What becomes more evident as this meme multiples is that a lot of this slang isn’t actually Gen Z’s. “It’s giving,” “slay,” “serving”—these terms are decades old, filtering from Black/Latinx ball culture and into the mainstream via shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race. “Rizz,” the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year in 2023, is newer, but when it’s being used to tout the collection of the Royal Armouries, it’s far removed from the Twitch streams of Kai Cenat, who popularized the term.
Intergenerational razzing happens all the time, especially online. When “OK boomer” took off in 2019, The New York Times said it was the “end of friendly generational relations,” a sign that Gen Z was fed up with being looked down on by the older cohort. Millennials, still Very Online, were too burned out to really pick fights, but Z seemed willing to speak its mind, to become the internet’s culture engine. Sometimes this manifested in the adoption or appropriation of what came before; sometimes it meant creating language and humor that’s all but impenetrable.
When Gen Z then started looking down on Gen X, however, the refrain quickly became that this was the one age group that was not to be fucked with. Latchkey kids grew up touching grass, and getting insulted online hits them differently. They may reply to your TikTok, or possibly just send their most notorious and most polysyllabic white rapper after you.
Now, boomers and Gen Xers are getting on TikTok and turning Z’s slang into a marketing ploy, something that feels both funny and antithetical to the younger generation’s self-proclaimed hipness and Xers’ anticapitalist bent.
“Gen Z writes the marketing script” isn’t the first TikTok trend to go viral by sending up the ways various generations speak online. Two months ago it was about asking Gen Z staffers to edit your video and then posting their quick-cut compilations of awkward “ums” and pauses.
What’s happening with the marketing script videos feels different, something full-circle from the days of “OK boomer.” All of the generations are on TikTok now, and if anyone wants to keep their in-group chatter to themselves, they’ll need to go somewhere else. (Ask Gen Alpha. Maybe they know the place.) Language flourishes online; it also becomes its most muddied and misused self there. When someone from an older generation gets on TikTok to recite the new generation’s slang, the gag is obvious. It’s just not always clear who the joke is on.
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